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Kylo Ren Is The Most 2015 Bad Guy Ever

Star Wars: The Force Awakens‘ baddie Kylo Ren is not the mysterious overlord the trailers hyped him up to be. Au contraire. Underneath that scary mask he’s just a dude. A scrawny white dude with a bad temper and a serious case of the daddy complexes. Everything about him, from his true appearance, to the way his identity is revealed and his astonishing final confrontation with Finn and Rey, is an enormous, yet brilliant anticlimax. He’s a loser. A try-hard. A whiny little kid who thinks he can play with the big boys, pretend to be a wise and mysterious lord of the Sith while he really seems to know jack about the intricacies of the Force, let alone about properly holding a lightsaber. Yet that is what makes him so special. He is the terrifying, a-long-time-ago-in-a-galaxy-far-far-away analogue to teenagers here and now channeling their personal frustrations into pompous extremism, fascist sympathies and pseudo-intellectual self-righteousness. Soundsfamiliar? Anyone? He is the face of evil in 2015. Or at least, he thinks he is. Yet does that mean we shouldn’t take him — or any of the other entitled babies we can compare him to — seriously? Hell no. Kylo Ren may be a wangsty brat, but he’s still very much a threat, because he would do everything, no matter how outrageous, unexpected, cowardly, dishonest or downright cretinous, to prove just how evil he is. And that arguably makes him more dangerous than Darth Vader ever would have been.